On April 20, 2023, China’s Supreme People’s Court released a second report entitled Status of Judicial Protection of Intellectual Property Rights in Chinese Courts (2022) (中国法院知识产权司法保护状况（2022年)). This follows the earlier Annual Report of the Intellectual Property Court (IPC) for 2022 released on March 30, 2023. The earlier report focused on the Supreme People’s Court’s IP Tribunal while this second report deals with IP litigation throughout China’s court system. Some highlights of the second Report include:

• In 2022, local people’s courts at all levels newly accepted 438,480 civil IP cases of first instance and concluded 457,805, a year-on-year decrease of 20.31% and 11.25%, respectively.
• However, the number of first-instance patent cases increased by 23.25% to 38,970 respectively from the previous year;
• First-instance trademark cases dropped by 9.82% to 112,474 year-on-year; 
• First-instance copyright cases decreased by 29.07% to 255,693; and
• First-instance technology contract cases grew by 5.55% to 4,238.

In 2022, local courts newly accepted 46,524 civil IP cases of second instance, down 5.22% year on year, and concluded 46,563, up 2.41% on a year-on-year basis. The Supreme People’s Court newly accepted 3,786 civil IP cases and concluded 3,073, a year-on-year drop of 10.77% and 13.61%, respectively.

Criminal IP cases also dropped. Local courts accepted 5,336 criminal IP infringement cases of first instance and concluded 5,456, down 14.98% and 9.76% respectively. In particular, 4,971 trademark infringement criminal cases were newly accepted, and 5,099 were concluded, a year28– on-year drop of 15.3% and 9.86%, respectively; 304 copyright infringement criminal cases were newly accepted, and 302 were concluded, down 8.71% and 7.93%.

The full report is available here (Chinese and English).